in any case, was meeting up with her boyfriend over the weekend!
By the time she and Jan arrived, rain had brought proceedings to a soggy halt for the day and the players were sitting around in the bar. Kath already knew some of the Somerset lads through Brian, and I had noticed her presence in a pair of navy blue hot pants and long white boots at a match at Weston-Super-Mare with more than a passing interest. She had never set eyes on me before, however, so when I sat down with the group she first asked me what I did for a living, then enquired as to whether I had watched any of the match before the rain had fallen.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was playing in it.’
After recovering from that slight embarrassment the evening turned out to be fun, and Dennis Breakwell and I duly invited Kath and Lindsay out for a Chinese meal. Kath decided to drive, but as we walked through the gates she suddenly realized she had forgotten where the car was parked. We ended up walking two-thirds of the way round the ground, then sprinting the final section as the rain started to bucket down again before finally diving into the vehicle, which was in fact parked right back where we had started, having been obscured by a large van.
I don’t remember much about that evening, but I do recall making every effort to persuade Kath to come to Derby, where we were playing the following Sunday. It was at this stage that I realized I had serious competition as she told me of her arrangements regarding her boyfriend. However, my constant telephone calls, backed up by some helpful encouragement from Jan, appeared to do the trick and a few weeks later Jan, Gerry and Kath all travelled down to Taunton for a match and a meal afterwards with Closey and myself. It was after this that Jan made one of the worst character assessments of all time. ‘What a nice, quiet young man’ she told her daughter. In any case, it was clear to both of us by now that there was a mutual attraction and the courtship began in earnest.
Kath was doing a business studies course at Lanchester polytechnic in Coventry and, in between times, working for her father helping to promote high-quality drums and drumsticks used by some of the big name rock stars. Incidentally, in view of the ‘Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ allegations that were to dog our life together in future years, it was somewhat ironic that Kath was the first to rub shoulders with rock stars like Phil Collins of Genesis and Jon Bonham of Led Zeppelin in this capacity.
As our relationship blossomed, Kath managed to arrange as many business trips as possible to coincide with my county games, and in her trusty Austin 1100 she would appear at cricket grounds in Somerset, Devon, Cornwall or wherever we happened to be playing at the time. And in September 1974, just three months after we met, I proposed.
Kath recalls the moment far more vividly than I for the simple reason that I was drunk at the time. She had been down for the weekend and we ended up at Carnaby’s nightclub in Yeovil. Although I enjoy the atmosphere of such places, I am about as expert in soft-shoe shuffling as I am at singing, so while Kath spent most of the evening dancing with one of my oldest mates, John Saunders, I spent all of it emptying the contents of various glasses down my throat. It is just possible that as the evening wore on, the amount of attention Kath was being paid by John and the amount of drink I was consuming combined to create a tinge of jealousy on my part. In any case, shortly before leaving, I took hold of Kath and announced, very matter-of-fact, ‘I’ve decided. We’ll get married’. I was eighteen at the time, Kath nineteen.
The next morning Kath sought confirmation.
‘Do you remember what you said last night?’ she asked.
‘Of course I do,’ I said.
So our future was set. The proposal was not exactly by the book, I grant you, but we were convinced it was the right thing to do, and as far as we were concerned our age didn’t matter.
Not surprisingly, however, the news brought a rather different if wholly understandable reaction from those close to us. My father Les burst out laughing, wondering how on earth I could contemplate such a move on £500 a year. Kath’s father, Gerry, humoured us initially; I don’t think he thought we were serious. But when it became clear that we were, he helped us enormously by offering me a winter job working as a one of his sales representatives.
When the summer of 1975 arrived news of our plans had to be broken to Closey, who was also Kath’s godfather. Showing remarkable courage we left that deed to Jan and Gerry, with predictable results. Closey exploded and gave them both a severe ticking off for allowing us to go ahead. He argued that we were far too young to be making such a commitment and told them that he was very concerned about Kath being married to a man who was going to be away from home so often. He was also worried that marriage might hold back my career. Later he took me to one side and warned me that if I ever did anything to upset Kath, he would be at my throat before I knew it. Then he also gave Kath a talking to along the lines of my having a lot of potential and that she would have to understand that cricket came first.
Undeterred, Kath and I kept to our plan. We had originally intended to wait for three or four years before actually taking the plunge but while attending the wedding of a friend a few weeks later, my impatience and impetuosity got the better of me. ‘Let’s get married as soon as possible,’ I suggested. So we promptly set the date for the coming January!
Having decided to live in the north, Kath found us a tiny two-bedroomed cottage in Mowbray Street, Epworth, opposite the birthplace of the methodist John Wesley, and Jan and Gerry gave us the deposit as a wedding present. Furniture was begged and borrowed and, with the help of another friend, I even managed to install a central heating system.
My only concern about the whole affair was what Kath was going to wear. I am very much a traditionalist when it comes to this kind of occasion, so you can imagine my reaction when I heard the rumour that my bride-to-be was contemplating walking down the aisle in a white trouser-suit. Suitably unimpressed, I took Jan to one side and pleaded with her to make sure that when they went to choose the wedding dress, she should do all in her power to dissuade Kath from picking anything too unusual. She did try. On one occasion, according to Jan, Kath fell in love with something pretty horrible which she had set her heart on. ‘Of course you can have it,’ said Jan, ‘but you’ll have to pay for it yourself’, and their journey home was endured in stony silence.
In the event, the only real casualty of our wedding day was ‘Jerusalem’ – the organist murdered it. So there I was, on 31 January 1976, married, housed and established in the Somerset first XI by the age of twenty.
I realized, however, that the real work now had to begin in earnest. This was the make-or-break point for me, the moment when my career could have gone one of two ways: I would either make real progress, or there was a real chance I would end up looking at an uncertain future. I was determined to succeed and, as Closey had indicated when he warned Kath of the consequences of getting married to me at such a young age, that inevitably was going to lead to difficulties in our relationship.
To put it simply, my attitude was that if the Ian Botham story was going to go anywhere, my cricket had to come first no matter what the cost. In fact, the Ian Botham story was lucky to last beyond late May, when Brian Close nearly killed me.
Closey was an appalling driver. I recall one time when he took his car into a garage for crash repairs, collected it on the same day, then returned it for more of the same less than a few minutes later. He had got a lift from Gerry to the garage, signed the papers, said ‘Thanks very much’ and drove away from the forecourt to a roundabout where, only 50 yards away and in full view of the mechanics who had just finished patching it up, he ploughed straight into the back of a lorry. Within minutes he was recircling the roundabout and limping back to the garage to ask them to mend it again.
Despite his incompetence behind the wheel I normally travelled everywhere with Brian, though one time that I didn’t
